New draft manuscript on the crisis of digital teleologies in the era of post-Truth politics. The digital and network triumphalism, that was presumed to empower to the technocratic class, has enabled digitally mediated reaction in the form of Trump. Key to these teleologies was an affect determinism in which the coalescence of affective energies was hailed as enabling civic minded collaboration and new creative political "becomings" (in the Deleuzian sense). This manuscript takes on two developments as a critique of this affect determinism. First, the return of paranoia and trauma in the form of cyber warfare and second, the attempt of blockchain technology to recapitulate the teleology of computation as truth and a first order social value. The turn of the great affect scholar Brian Massumi to blockchain as a revolutionary technology is illustrative of an techno-affect accelerationism that I wish to critique by way of Lacanian affect theory.

The emerging blockchain-technology is expected to contribute to the transformation of ownership, government services, and global supply chains. By analyzing a crisis which occurred with one of its frontrunners, Ethereum, this article explores discrepancies between the purported governance of blockchains and the de facto control through expertise and reputation. Ethereum is also considered as an exemplification of a libertarian techno-utopianism. When " The DAO, " a highly publicized but faulty crowdfunded venture fund was deployed on the Ethereum blockchain, the techno-utopianism was suspended, and developers fell back on strong network ties. Now that the blockchain technology sees an increasing uptake, this article also seeks to unearth broader implications of the blockchain for the proliferation or blockage of global finance and beyond. Contrasting claims about the disruptive nature of the technology, this article finds that blockchain re-inspires the belief in a crisis-ridden, financialized capitalism by redeeming the positive utopia of ontic, individualized, debt.

Blockchain technology is, in part, a proposal to resolve ‘the political’ through technical means: decentralised networks to solve the problem of authority; cryptography to coordinate and secure the network; and game theory and incentive design to solve network behaviour. This PhD thesis draws on theoretical work by Karen Barad (2007) and Jacques Rancière (Rancière, 2010) to ask the question of what matters politically in blockchain technology – both in the sense of matter as becoming material of a new mediation of the political, but also mattering in the sense of being of political importance to engineers, developers and communities forming around blockchain as a potential. Rather than treating blockchain as coherent thing to be either celebrated or criticised, this thesis proposes and attempts to draw out the ways in which the potentials of blockchain are negotiated as part of its political effects, looking towards these negotiations to understand how political differences are made and sought materialised. Three approaches to the political are articulated to analyse Bitcoin and Ethereum as case studies and shift their terms of debate. Firstly, addressing the question of algorithmic determinacy, an approach is proposed for critically understanding a blockchain proposition that does not immediately revert to a competition of control between ‘human’ and ‘machine’ through the notion of the insensible, drawing on work by geographer of the inhuman Yusoff (2013a). Secondly, drawing on political theorist Rancière (2010) a particular blockchain sensibility is articulated, addressing the question of the particular kind of ‘disruption’ that blockchain presents. Its specific provenance in political histories of decentralised network computation opens up political significance beyond its intersections with financial capitalism. Finally, addressing the question of blockchain as a resolution to the political, the thesis introduces the concept of dissensible as an ongoing potential for incompatible sensibilities and their negotiation.

This dissertation provides an analysis of the ideological component behind the crypto-anarchist enthusiasm for the highly topical emerging technology of distributed ledger technology, commonly known as ‘blockchain’. Philosophy of technology scholars have drawn attention to the fact that technologies can possess political properties and serve to reinforce or challenge power structures. Public blockchains have an unquestionable social and political character due to their capacity to facilitate the emergence of cryptographic, decentralized and reliable peer-to-peer networks. The exponential adoption of this disruptive technology, which is poised to cause transformational changes across socio-technical systems and organizational structures, means that both its political properties and the ideological forces behind its development as a political technology must be recognized. Accordingly, this dissertation engages with some of the most ideologically-driven projects aiming to tap into blockchain’s political and economic potential, namely those of Bitcoin, FairCoin, Democracy Earth and Bitnation. These projects exemplify what is posited as the main ideological cleavage within crypto-anarchism, which revolves around the privileged agent and vision that should be empowered and trusted to capture the decentralizing potential offered by blockchain technology. The paper offers an original contribution by conceptualizing the cleavage as separating; ‘crypto-libertarians’, whose neo-Hobbesian individualistic vision sees the invisible hand of the free market as the privileged agent driving a trustless technology; and ‘crypto-commonists’, whose collectivist vision regards blockchain as a trust-enabling technology that should be used to facilitate collaborative economic paradigms and participatory forms of e-democracy. The dissertation concludes that while both strands of blockchain enthusiasts have a shared interest in promoting personal privacy, radical transparency, and eroding the authority of nation-states, their diametrically opposed views on human nature and socio-economic organization seem presently irreconcilable. The research undertaken for this paper has covered a substantial breadth of the existing academic material concerning the philosophy and politics of blockchain technology, consulting books, journals, white papers and online articles. This dissertation contributes with an ideological conceptualization to the fields of techno-politics and blockchain studies, an academic intersection still in its infancy, but which will undoubtedly attract increasing academic attention.

This paper first traces a continuity between the rationalities and techniques underlying blockchain technologies and those that structure liberal governmentality, and second, examines the ways that core aspects of governmentality are potentially transformed by the discursive imaginary of blockchain technologies. The core argument made is that imaginaries of the blockchain reproduce many core aspects of liberal governmentality, particularly in the ways in which they use calculation as both a political rationality and a technique. However, while technologies of liberal governmentality still account for a nominally free, rational subject, the blockchain imagines a system of governance that reduces much of the contingency (as risk, uncertainty and political unrest) associated with liberal governmentality and the free actions of the liberal political subject.

The emerging field of token engineering aims to open “economy itself as design space,” using blockchains and other distributed ledger and smart contract tech- nologies in combination with game theory and behavioral economics. This paper describes the emergence of the Ethereum network as the principle site for the development of a cryptographically tokenized mode of economic life, and the re- construction of human economic agency along game-theoretic lines in the figure of Homo cryptoeconomicus. The paper draws together questions from the econo- mization and marketization, materiality and human/non-human agency programs in economic sociology: token engineering represents both a new field of practice for a self-consciously performative economics, and a potential point of intervention for a practice-oriented mode of social studies of finance.

Artists Re: Thinking the Blockchain is the first book of its kind, intersecting artistic, speculative, conceptual, and technical engagements with the technology heralded as “the new internet”. The book features a range of newly commissioned essays, fictions, illustration and art documentation exploring what the blockchain might mean for our collective futures. Imagined as a future-artefact from a time before the blockchain changed the world, and a protocol by which a community of thinkers can transform what that future might be, Artists Re: Thinking The Blockchain acts as a gathering and focusing of contemporary ideas surrounding this still largely mythical and wildly hyped technology. The book comprises documentation of artistic projects engaged in the blockchain, including foundational works Plantoid, Terra0, and Bittercoin; Theorisation of key areas in the global blockchain conversation by writers such as Hito Steyerl, Rachel O’Dwyer, Rob Myers, Ben Vickers and Holly Herndon; and new poetry, illustration and speculative fiction by Theodorios Chiotis, Cecilia Wee, Juhee Hahm and many more. Threaded throughout the book is Finbook a web-based project in partnership with Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Finbook is an interface where readers and bots can trade on the value of chapters included in the book, rendering the book with an Internet-of-Things like interactivity, and imagining a new regime for cultural value under blockchain conditions.

Since 2009, blockchain has served as a potentially transformative record technology that is expected to be as revolutionary as the Internet. Originally developed as a methodology for registering cryptocurrency transactions, Blockchain's functionality has evolved into a large number of applications, such as banking, financial markets, accounting, supply chains, voting systems and government services. This document aims to explain blockchain technology while providing an initial discussion on how this innovation could allow a real-time, verifiable and transparent business ecosystem. In addition, blockchain has the potential to create digital companies through intelligent contracts that allow automation and democratization of decision making. Clasificación JEL: O33

Vega, A., Clohessy, T., & Walsh, E (Ed) (2021). Economics of Blockchain, Student Paper Research Series, Department of Enterprise and Technology, Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, Volume 1, May, Online: https://libsearch.gmit.ie/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=275122

Industry researchers and anthropologists in the ‘payment space’ are talking of a ‘Cambrian explosion of payments’.1The explosion is Cambrian, explains Bill Maurer, ‘in that new body forms, adaptations of existing structures, and novel relationships in a variegating ecology of retail payment are coming into being all at once’.2 Readers with an interest in the payment space are no doubt familiar with some of these ways to pay (or otherwise transfer), from M-PESA to Venmo, Bitcoin to Alipay, and while not all rely on the bundle of technologies we (still) call the phone, it is doubtful there would be talk of such an explosion without the prior explosion of these digital devices. Part of what is happening with payments is a becoming-money-like of phones, of phones substituting for other money artefacts such as cash or card. Of course, it is by no means a straightforward substitution: the becoming-money-like of phones is equally a becoming-phone-like of money. And since the phone is always already a bundle or stack of technologies, what is happening with money and what that might mean more generally in terms of (political) economy is anything but clear.